Notes from the field.
On AI, marketing, enterprise sales, and the future of how technology gets bought and sold.
Starbucks is paying baristas to make TikToks. The strategy was sitting in plain sight for a decade.
At Cannes, Starbucks said it's the first brand to pilot a custom Creator Network inside TikTok, paying select baristas through ad revenue sharing to m…
Albertsons made a scripted drama from its shopper data. P&G has been here since the 1930s.
Albertsons Media Collective and P&G premiered "Rico's Tacos," a scripted microdrama built from Albertsons' loyalty-card data, at Cannes this month. A…
Kroger is renting its shoppers to TikTok. Walmart spent a year making sure it never has to.
Kroger Precision Marketing launched self-service advertising with TikTok, letting brands target Kroger's purchase-data audiences inside TikTok's own p…
The pages AI cites and the pages Google ranks are barely the same list anymore.
New 5W research, built on Brandlight data, says the overlap between the top Google results and the sources AI assistants cite has fallen from about 70…
Google is turning search ads into a conversation. The keyword is the casualty.
At Google Marketing Live, Google showed Gemini-powered ad formats that run inside AI Mode and conversational Search, not as a row of links. The keywor…
Fox didn't buy a streaming app. It bought the operating system inside 100 million TVs.
Fox agreed to buy Roku for about $22 billion, and most coverage filed it as a content company grabbing a streaming service. What changed hands is the…
Cursor was the neutral choice. The company that just bought it owns a model.
SpaceX is buying Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, for about $60 billion in stock. A huge share of developers standardized on Cursor for one reaso…
Qualcomm paid $4 billion to attack a software moat. Yours is next.
Qualcomm is paying about $3.92 billion in stock for Modular, a startup that makes no chips — only software that runs an AI model across any vendor's s…
Walmart bought the self-serve button for TV. It's aimed at the advertisers TV always priced out.
Walmart is acquiring Vibe.co, a self-serve connected-TV platform with 10,000+ mostly-SMB advertisers that lets you buy streaming TV like a paid-social…
Walmart let ChatGPT and Gemini sell its products. It refused to let them own the customer.
OpenAI's Instant Checkout converted about three times worse than Walmart.com, so Walmart pulled it and embedded its own Sparky agent inside ChatGPT an…
OpenAI and Anthropic are going public. Your AI contract should price that in.
Anthropic filed a confidential S-1; OpenAI followed, targeting a September debut around $730–850B. When your model vendor becomes a public company, it…
The AI SDR boom is real. Retention is the test it has to pass.
AI SDR tools are a multibillion-dollar category growing fast — and wrestling with retention, with some vendors losing a large share of buyers within a…
The companies with the best AI on earth are hiring salespeople faster than SaaS is.
At OpenAI and Anthropic, go-to-market is the single largest category of open roles, about one in five, ahead of research and engineering. The firms mo…
The government pulled the best AI model on earth four days after launch. What's your fallback?
Anthropic shipped Fable 5 on June 9, its most capable model ever. By June 13 the Commerce Department had ordered it dark for every foreign national on…
OpenAI now takes Oracle credits. Your AI deal is competing with money that's already spent.
OpenAI's models can now be paid for with Oracle Universal Credits, and the announcement ends by sending buyers to their Oracle rep. Cloud commitments…
The Boomers cut the cord too, and most media plans missed it
For three years the cord-cutting story has been about the young walking out on cable. The 50-plus crowd quietly did the same thing while everyone watc…
When private equity buys your software vendor, the roadmap goes with it.
Thoma Bravo closed its ~$2B Verint deal and wrapped PROS, while Vista and Silver Lake circle the same profitable, sticky software now trading cheap af…
Per-seat software is dying. Your renewal is where you'll feel it first.
Roughly $285B in software market value vanished in February once investors did the math on AI agents that don't pay for seats. Gartner expects 40% of…
Your next big customer is a shopping agent that doesn't care about your brand.
By 2030, NielsenIQ expects about half of online shoppers to hand routine buying to an AI agent, and pegs the U.S. agentic-commerce prize near a trilli…
Banks are done piloting AI. What they're buying now is boring on purpose.
Banks moved from AI pilots to production fleets of agents this year, and Wolters Kluwer says 44% of finance teams will use agentic AI in 2026, a 600%+…
Commerce media just passed TV. And the agents are taking the keyboard.
WPP says commerce media hit $178B in global ad revenue and overtook TV for the first time. At the same moment, Amazon and Walmart are moving the actua…
Microsoft just made “shadow AI” the new shadow IT. Your agent has a new gatekeeper.
Microsoft took Agent 365 generally available and pointed it straight at “shadow AI” — unmanaged agents running inside the enterprise. It can already d…
Two AI labs are about to go public. The model was never the moat.
OpenAI is targeting a September IPO, Anthropic is racing to follow in October, and the S-1s will force both into a kind of financial transparency the…
Anthropic just crossed $900B. The AI category sale is over.
Anthropic is reportedly closing a $30B round at a $900B+ valuation. PwC is certifying 30,000 professionals on Claude. The Big Four have placed their b…
Oura just filed to go public. The hardest test comes after the IPO.
Oura confidentially filed its S-1 yesterday — 5.5M rings sold, an $11B valuation, a category it invented. The harder challenge isn't the debut; it's t…
Two weeks later: OpenAI shipped the Ads Manager. The seller's read.
Two weeks ago OpenAI opened self-serve ChatGPT ads. Today the actual Ads Manager UI shipped, with Dentsu, Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, Adobe, Criteo, and S…
The fake watches were better — and that should terrify every brand
Justin Taylor's piece on The Landing Pad asks a simple question about the Swatch x Audemars Piguet teaser: when AI fills the white space between tease…
Publicis bought LiveRamp for $2.2B. The real story is who controls identity now.
Press release landed Tuesday: Publicis is paying $2.167B for LiveRamp — $38.50 a share, 29.8% premium, all cash. Most coverage treats it as another ho…
Claude autonomously found a 17-year-old zero-day. Pen-testing as a service has 12 months.
Anthropic gave Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike early access to an unreleased model called Mythos. In limited testing it autonomously…
Stanford: agentic AI delivers 71% productivity gains. 80% of enterprises will miss them.
Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report dropped, and most of the coverage missed the actual story: 71% median productivity gain for enterprises using agentic…
The week agentic AI stopped being a demo
On May 5, Anthropic put Claude agents into production at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citi, AIG, and Visa. Not pilots — production. Salesforce Agent…
OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into an ad platform. Here's what brands need to do in the next 90 days.
On May 5, OpenAI dropped the $50K minimum, opened self-serve to every U.S. advertiser, and added CPC bidding. The ChatGPT pilot is already pulling $10…
GEO is the new SEO — and most brands are already losing
I searched "best CRM for mid-market" in ChatGPT and Claude this morning. The same three vendors came up. None of them were the category leader. Here's…
AI didn't kill the entry-level job. Interest rates and a tax change did.
The narrative is clean: AI is replacing humans, that's why nobody's hiring. The data is messier. A Federal Reserve study of one million firms found "p…
Selling AI to skeptical buyers (a field guide)
Marketers, agency leads, pharma commercial teams — the buyers I sell to are smart, busy, and have seen 50 AI demos this quarter. Here's how I frame th…